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Isaac Asimov’s seminal Foundation trilogy—one of the cornerstones of modern speculative fiction—in a single hardcover volume.

It is the saga of the Galactic Empire, crumbling after twelve thousand years of rule. And it is the particular story of psychohistorian Hari Seldon, the only man who can see the horrors the future has in store—a dark age of ignorance, barbarism, and violence that will last for thirty thousand years. Gathering a band of courageous men and women, Seldon leads them to a hidden location at the edge of the galaxy, where he hopes they can preserve human knowledge and wisdom through the age of darkness.

In 1966, the Foundation trilogy received a Hugo Award for Best All-Time Series, and it remains the only fiction series to have been so honored. More than fifty years after their original publication, the three Foundation novels stand as classics of thrilling, provocative, and inspired world-building.

"Notes From a Dead Horse" by Fyodor Dostoevsky
From the acclaimed translators Pevear and Volokhonsky comes a new translation of the first great prison memoir: Fyodor Dostoevsky’s fictionalized account of his life-changing penal servitude in Siberia.
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"Man at the Helm" by Nina Stibbe
The first novel from a remarkably gifted writer with a voice all her own, "Man at the Helm" is a hilarious and occasionally heart-breaking portrait of childhood in an unconventional family.
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Editorial Reviews

About the Author

Isaac Asimov (1920–1992), one of the “Big Three” science fiction masters of his time (along with Robert Heinlein and Arthur C. Clarke), is best known for his Robot, Galactic Empire, and Foundation series.

Michael Dirda is a Pulitzer Prize–winning critic for The Washington Post and the author of the memoir An Open Book and of four collections of essays: Readings, Bound to Please, Book by Book, and Classics for Pleasure.

It is late summer, 1941. A young Jewish intellectual, an admirer of Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, suddenly finds himself musing about historical determinism, individual initiative and the ideal society. Why did Rome fall? Was the Christian religion a means of preserving ancient culture? What forms of government and economic system are best for mankind? Democratic representation with capitalistic competition? Enlightened despotism? A meritocracy of the best and the brightest?

Having come of age in 1930s' New York, the young intellectual would have heard fervent Trotskyites on street corners proclaim that history advances through class struggle and through the conflict between evolving political and economic ideologies. He already knew that Arnold Toynbee, in A Study of History, contended that civilizations have their seasons — they rise, grow stagnant without sufficient challenges, eventually decay and fall. Still other thinkers, among them H.G. Wells, were convinced that the world should be governed by scientists, with rational benevolence. Wasn't that the theme of the recent movie, Things to Come (1936), with its vision of a perfectly ordered, chrome-bright "world of tomorrow"?

Still, all these systems and theories made historical change seem a cut-and-dried affair, quite logical, utterly inevitable. Yet where was the individual in these grand schemes of Marx and Toynbee and Wells? If only impersonal forces determined the course of events, how did one account for a Hitler? An upstart from nowhere, he had manipulated the German people with a mesmerist's power, promulgated a manifest destiny for his chosen elite, declared a Thousand-Year Reich. Clearly, the so-called Führer viewed himself as a Great Man, able to reshape his time as did Alexander and Napoleon before him. Such overreachers truly make history, don't they?

So Isaac Asimov, a twenty-one-year-old Columbia graduate, must have thought and wondered when he sat down at his typewriter that summer of 1941. However, what the young writer eventually produced was neither a turgid sociological tract nor a summa of world history. Instead, through a series of stories, Asimov tracked the breakdown of a smug conspicuously rich and stultified civilization, while also portraying the efforts of a highly committed group of activists to hasten the birth of a new and more glorious future society. In effect, he took the central myth of the 1930s and '40s — lived out and believed in by Communists, Fascists, the International Brigade and New Deal Democrats alike — and re-imagined it, with spaceships, in a galaxy far, far away. Science fiction is, after all, the art of extrapolation.

By the time Asimov brought his much loved series to a halt in 1949, he had written eight stories and novellas depicting the collapse of a Galactic Empire, the war-torn feudal period that followed, and the mysterious Foundation established to preserve civilization in a time of barbarism. Gathered together into book form — what SF fans call a "fix-up" — the stories required three volumes: Foundation (1951), Foundation and Empire (1952) and Second Foundation (1953). At the 1955 World Science Fiction Convention this trilogy was enthusiastically voted "the greatest all-time science-fiction series." Period. In the view of many, the assembled sequence also represents a watershed in literary history. A noted SF editor Donald Wollheim quickly realized: "Stores published before Foundation belong to the old line, the stories published after belong to 'modern' science fiction."

*

Isaac Asimov (1920-92) grew up in Brooklyn, the son of Russian Jewish immigrants. Something of a whiz kid, he graduated early from high school and attended Columbia University, first as an undergraduate and later as a biochemistry graduate student. After earning his Ph. D., he taught for many years at Boston University before giving up the academic life in 1958 to become a full-time writer.

As a teenager, Asimov had been a devoted reader of the pulp magazines at his father's candy store: Wonder Stories, Amazing Stories, Astounding Science Fiction. In their pages one could follow the galactic adventures of E. E. "Doc" Smith's "Skylark of Space," shudder at "The Human Pets of Mars" and fight alongside "Tumithak of the Corridors." Before long, the teenaged Asimov begun to crank out his own short stories; the first to be published "Marooned on Vest," appearing in Amazing in 1939. After many rejections, he shortly thereafter broke into Astounding — the premier magazine in the field — with "Trends" (originally titled, with a kind of clairvoyance, "Ad Astra" — i.e., "to the stars"). That "yarn" appeared in the same July 1939 issue as A. E. van Vogt's first story ("Black Destroyer," almost certainly a partial inspiration for the film Alien) and only a month before Robert A. Heinlein's first story, "Lifeline." thus began the Golden Age of Science Fiction, which would last until roughly 1950.

Asimov developed quickly as a writer. He sold "Robbie," his first robot story, to Super Science Stories in 1940 (where its title was changed to "Strange Playfellow"), and his later ones to Astounding. Asimov always claimed it was John. W. Campbell, Jr., that magazine's legendary editor, who devised the central "Three Laws of Robotics" during a conversation at the end of 1940:

1. A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.2. A robot must obey the orders given it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.3. A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.

By 1941, Asimov was ready for what would prove his annus mirabilis. On March 17, when this still very young writer was visiting the Astounding offices, Campbell unexpectedly quoted a passage from Emerson: "If the stars should appear one night in a thousand years, how would men believe and adore; and preserve for many generations the remembrance of the city of God . . ." What, the magazine editor wondered, would happen to people who suddenly saw stars for the first time? Asimov said he didn't know. Campbell answered: "I think they would go mad. I want you to write a story about that."

According to the first volume of his autobiography, In Memory Yet Green, Asimov began the story on March 18, 1941 and finished it on April 8. "Nightfall," as he called it, was then published as the cover story for the September issue of Astounding — along with the conclusion of Robert Heinlein's short novel Methuselah's Children and in the company of Alfred Bester's now classic "Adam and No Eve." Since that day, "Nightfall" has been judged, over and over again, to be the greatest science-fiction story ever written. Happily neither Heinlein nor Bester would ever complain about this, since the former quickly established himself as the best science-fiction writer of all time and the latter's 1956 novel, The Stars My Destination, is widely and rightly, viewed as the best single SF novel ever written.

Having formulated the Laws of Robotics and then written "Nightfall," one might assume that young Asimov would devote the rest of his time to his studies. Hardly. That fall Astounding also brought out the first two Foundation stories. Years later, Asimov recalled the genesis of the series:

On August 1, 1941, I took the subway to Campbell's office after class was over. On the way down I racked my brain for a story idea. Failing, I tried a device I sometimes used. I opened a book at random and then tried free association, beginning with whatever I first saw.

The book I had with me was a collection of Gilbert and Sullivan plays. I opened it to Iolanthe — to the picture of the Fairy Queen throwing herself at the feet of Private Willis, the sentry. Thinking of sentries, I thought of soldiers, of military empires, of the Roman Empire — of the Galactic Empire — aha! . . ."

Why should I not write of the fall of the Galactic Empire and the return of feudalism, written from the viewpoint of someone in the secure days of the Second Galactic Empire? I thought I knew how to do it for I had read Edward Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire from first page to last at least twice, and I had only to make use of that.

I was bubbling over by the time I got to Campbell's, and my enthusiasm was catching. It was perhaps too catching for Campbell blazed up as I had never seen him do.

"That's too large a theme for a short story," he said.

"I was thinking of a novelette," I said, quickly, adjusting my thoughts.

"Or a novelette. It will have to be an open-ended series of short stories."

"What?" I said, weakly.

"Short stories, novelettes, serials, all fitting into a particular future history, involving the fall of the First Galactic Empire, the period of feudalism that follows and the rise of the Second Galactic Empire.

"What?" I said, even more weakly.

"Yes, I want you to write an outline for the future history. Go home and write an outline."

There Campbell had made a mistake. Robert Heinlein was writing what he called the "Future History Series." He was writing various stories that fitted into one niche or another of the series, and he wasn't writing them in order. Therefore he had prepared a Future History outline that was very detailed and complicated, so that he would keep everything straight. Now Campbell wanted me to do the same.

Heinlein, however, was Heinlein —and Asimov was not Heinlein.

I went home dutifully, and began preparing an outline that got longer and longer and stupider and stupider until I finally tore it up. It was quite plain that I couldn't work with an outline. (To this day I cannot — for any of my stories, articles, or books, whether fiction or nonfiction.)

On August 11, therefore, I started the story I had originally intended to write (with modifications that resulted from my discussions with Campbell), and the heck with possible future stories. I'd worry about them when the time came — and if the time came.

Since the First Galactic Empire was breaking down (in my story), certain scientists had set up a Foundation on a world at the rim of the Galaxy, purportedly to prepare a vast encyclopedia of human knowledge, but actually to cut down the period of feudalism and hasten the rise of the Second Empire. I called the story — drum roll, please — "Foundation."

Later in his autobiography, Asimov notes that he submitted "Foundation" on September 8 and on September 17 received a check for $126. From the on, Foundation stories appeared periodically, if irregularly, until the end of the 1940s. When they were collected, Asimov added one more to form a new introduction, and also changed most of the titles.

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

The Foundation trilogy (three first books) and the Foundation series (all seven) are often regarded as the greatest set of Science Fiction literature ever produced. The Foundation series won the one-time Hugo Award for "Best All-Time Series" in 1966. Isaac Asimov was among the world's best authors, an accomplished scientist, and he was also a genius with an IQ above 170, and it shows in the intelligently concocted but complex plots and narrative. There are already 331 reviews for this Science Fiction novel, however, I still believe I have something unqiue to contribute which is stated in my last paragraph.

This book and the rest in the series take place far in the future (allegedly 50,000 years) at a time when people live throughout the Galaxy. A mathematician Hari Seldon has developed a new branch of mathematics known as psychohistory. Using the law of mass action, it can roughly predict the future on a large scale. Hari Seldon predicts the demise of the Galactic Empire and creates a plan to save the knowledge of the human race in a huge encyclopedia and also to shorten the barbaric period expected to follow the demise from 30,000 years to 1,000 years. A select people are chosen to write the Encyclopedia and to unknowingly carry out the plan to re-create the Galactic Empire. What unfolds in this book and in the books that follow is the future history of the demise and re-emergence of a Galactic Empire, written as a series of adventures, in a similar fashion to the Star Wars series.

Even though this is arguably the greatest set of Science Fiction novels ever written, I do not recommend it to those who are only mildly interested in Science Fiction.Read more ›

The trilogy is essential, but since Asimov also capitalized on his own genius by writing what seems to be hundreds of lesser Foundation stories, it can all get very confusing and a bit draining. This is the second book in the original trilogy, so it is from a science fiction point of view essential reading. The trilogy itself comes up with two highly memorable characters, Hari Seldon, the psycho-historian, who uses Mathematics to predict the future and establish a "Foundation" that will limit the dark ages after the fall of the "Empire" to a single millenium (as opposed to ten.) He reappears as a hologram at certain points in the story with more or less accurate takes on what is happening in "History" at that point.The other very memorable character is the Mule. He represents the variable that makes predicting "History" mathematically a tricky business at least, not to mention impossible. He is a nasty totalitarian character who strangely in Asimov's hands manages to elicit some sympathy. Asimov is playing with the idea of predicting human behavior scientifically (or controlling it scientifically,) but this character is also a humanistic meditation on how masses of people get overwhelmed by evil social forces like fascism and soviet communism. You can see that Asimov lived through the era of Hitler, Mussolini, Franco and Stalin and that these cult of personality tyrants and the submission of masses of people to their destructive and sadistic wills profoundly affected his view of human nature. Foundation and Empire seems to be an attempt to come to terms with that experience, and so has something to say about the specifics of twentieth century history, as well as about historical philosophy.

[The quotation is from Salvor Hardin, Mayor of Terminus.]Let's say it's around 1940 or so; you're studying chemistry in grad school but your true love is history; you've read Edward Gibbon's _The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire_, but writing a historical novel set in the _past_ would require just too much research; you get the bright idea of writing a historical tale set in the _future_, about the decline and fall of a _Galactic_ Empire, and you suggest as much to John W. Campbell, Jr.Campbell's response: he gets excited and suggests that you introduce some pseudoscientific mumbo-jumbo about "psychohistory". Do you:(a) drop the idea and write something else?(b) write the story just as Campbell describes it?(c) use a little imagination, make Campbell's idea a bit more intellectually presentable, and crank out, not just a single story, but a Hugo-award-winning series?If you picked (c), congratulations; you're Isaac Asimov.The Hugo didn't come until 1965, when the Foundation series won for best all-time series (defeating even Tolkien's _Lord of the Rings_ books). By then Asimov had long ago tired of the series; you can tell by the first part of the third book. (But the _second_ part of the third book is probably the best part of the original three volumes.)And heck, even in order to keep it going _that_ long, he had to introduce a radical departure from the Seldon Plan, in which the Mule initiates not just another Seldon Crisis but a new element altogether, one that wasn't accounted for in the Plan. (And in even later installments, it becomes pretty clear that Asimov isn't exactly thrilled by either the Plan or the Empire it's supposed to bring about.)But in the first volume, all of it is still fresh.Read more ›